While cholera has hardly changed over the past centuries, the tools used to study it have not ceased to evolve. Using mobile phone records of 150,000 users, an EPFL-led study has shown to what extent human mobility patterns contributed to the spread of a cholera epidemic in Senegal in 2005.

The researchers’ findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlight the critical role a mass gathering of millions of pilgrims played in spreading of the disease, and how measures to improve sanitation at transmission hotspots could decrease the progression of future outbreaks.

“There is a lot of hype around using big data from mobile phones to study epidemiology,” says senior author Enrico Bertuzzo, from the Ecohydrology Laboratory at the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. This is largely due to the fact that mobile phone data can be used to reconstruct, with unprecedented detail, mobility fluxes of an entire population. “But I dare say that this is the first time that such data are exploited to their full potential in an epidemiological model.”

Cholera is an infectious disease that occurs primarily in developing countries with poor sanitation infrastructure. It spreads primarily via water that has been contaminated with the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, present in the feces of infected people. Human mobility and waterways both contribute to spreading the disease among human communities, whereas heavy precipitation events increase the chances of the bacteria to contaminate drinking water sources. Researchers at EPFL have developed a mathematical simulation model that accounts for these factors, which they tested on past outbreaks such as the one in Haiti in 2010.

Rising from living aboard a merchant ship to make ends meet with her family, to earning degrees at Princeton and Cambridge universities, Hazari says she wants to accomplish big things. At the top of that list: helping the many millions living in India’s poorest slums get access to clean water and sanitation, education and improved health care.

But Hazari doesn’t just dream big. In 2012, the 30-something Hazari developed a mobile phone application that’s helped tens of thousands of poor residents in Mumbai’s shantytowns to improve their lives and educate their children in just a few years.

It’s called m.Paani – “m” for mobile and “paani” an Indian word for water – and it’s earned Hazari numerous awards, including the prestigious Hult Prize awarded by former president Bill Clinton and, this week, the Global Leadership Award from the women’s empowerment organization Vital Voices.

The report begins with an overview of global sanitation access in 2015 and the different approaches currently being used to improve access. This is followed by a review of the potential uses of mobile channels in the sanitation value chain including examples of current applications.

This app turns any private toilet into a public toilet accessible to friends & friends of friends using social media connections, with the aim to solve the problem of too-few easily accessible toilets in cities. CLOO allows registered users to charge a small fee for the use of their toilet.

With this photo on Facebook local resident Akshay Arora asks the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) to "kindly send some one and get it clean this Toilet/Urinal". One day later on 7 April 2011, MCD replied: "Your complaint reference no. is 02/0704/SP"

The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) launched its Facebook page in January 2011 and an integrated SMS service in March 2011 to enable public monitoring of garbage collection sites and public urinals/toilets in areas under its jurisdiction.The first experiences were positive as illustrated by the example of 22-year-old Piyush Goyal posted his complaint of garbage spilling over from the dump in his area.

On January 8, he clicked pictures of the seven dirty ones in South Delhi’s R K Puram area and posted them on Facebook. And the next day, he says, he saw the pictures of clean dhalaos uploaded by the MCD.

“There is lot of transparency through this way. The man who actually cleans it asked me why I uploaded the pictures. So the information is going from top to the bottom,” says Goyal.

MCD additional commissioner (engineering) Anshu Prakash added:

“This system is increasing transparency, fixing accountability and putting everything under public scrutiny. And none of us like to be ashamed in public. So people have started working at the bottom”.

Deep Springs International (DSI), a non-profit organization based in Pennsylvania, USA, and Nokia Research Center (NRC), Palo Alto, California, are teaming up to ensure the supply of clean drinking water in Haiti with NFC (near field communication) technology.

DSI has been delivering water treatment systems (which essentially consist of a covered 19-liter bucket with a spigot at the bottom) and a locally manufactured chlorine solution it has labeled Gadyen Dlo (Creole for "water guardian") since 2007.. Photo: Michael Ritter, DSI

Water treatment kits are being provided to track chlorine levels in household drinking water using NFC-enabled cell phones. NRC provided the health workers with approximately 50 Nokia 6212 NFC-enabled phones while UPM RFID supplied UPM BullsEye™ NFC tags with NXP Mifare Ultralight chip. Joseph “Jofish” Kaye, Senior Research Scientist, NRC, initiated the project together with David Holstius, a student and Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health, who developed the software application for mobile phones.

Families in the most rural areas in Haiti will have one water treatment kit consisting of a five-gallon (19 litre) plastic bucket with a lid and spigot. The RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags are attached to buckets for storing the treated drinking water and delivered to families together with a chlorine solution and written instructions for using the kit. When DSI’s water technicians visit their homes, they check whether they are using the kits properly and provide additional chlorine solutions. The technicians will read the tags using NFC cell phones loaded with software guiding them to ask relevant questions about the water being tested. They then send the data to DSI’s headquarters via SMS. The software application uses the Frontline SMS platform.

So, it took a bit longer than planned (like most IT projects) but I am happy to share with you today a sneak preview (or beta version) of the new upgraded SuSanA website. The launch of the upgraded website is just around the corner; we hope to have it done by the SuSanA meeting on 26 August next week Saturday. Meanwhile, if you have a spare 5 minutes, please […]

Dear Soumya, Thanks for posting your 4 papers here on the forum. I followed the link you gave in this thread and found this information: Data Availability: The following data and information are available at GitHub ( github.com/Barbaraevansuk/Fecal-sludge-e...-and-transport-costs ): The excel-based cost model; Input data on costs used in the cost model; The […]

Dear Neil, Is it possible to browse through the discussion on the role of systematic reviews in low and middle income countries (LMICs) somewhere on your website (without being a member)? If not, I guess we have to wait for the synthesis report in September (please post it here when it's done). Did the topic of sanitation get any airtime during this dis […]

Dear Duncan, Thanks a lot for posting about your paper here, giving us the opportunity to discuss this and to correspond directly with the author which is super! It's a really important topic: "The elimination of open defecation and its adverse health effects: a moral imperative for governments and development professionals" I looked at the ch […]

Dear SuSanA Community, SuSanA has 300 Partners now and yes, our network is growing! We take pleasure in featuring our 300th partner 3ie. Want to know more about 3ie? 3ie is an international grant-making NGO promoting evidence-informed development policies and programmes. Their work focuses on generating high quality evidence that contributes to effective pol […]